Star Wars video games

• 1. Introduction

  ›

  Star Wars video games trace their history to 1978, when Apple Computer built an unlicensed space combat program on cassette tape for the Apple II. The player destroyed TIE fighters from a first-person cockpit view, years before George Lucas had formally licensed his franchise to anyone. That small, unauthorized experiment on a home computer pointed toward a question that would define the next four decades: who gets to tell Star Wars stories in interactive form, and on whose terms?

  By 2020, the answer had produced over 90 million copies sold across more than a hundred officially licensed titles. The games span the full arc of home computing history, from the 8-bit cartridges of the early 1980s to virtual reality headsets and online worlds that ran for years before going dark. Three distinct corporate eras shaped what those games looked like, who made them, and whether they even count as part of the Star Wars story anymore. One of those eras erased almost everything that came before it.

• 2. The First Wave

  ›

  Kenner's 1979 Star Wars Electronic Battle Command was the first officially licensed Star Wars electronic game, and it arrived as a tabletop unit rather than a television game. Players took turns scanning star systems, avoiding black holes, tracking enemies, and searching for MAGNA, described on the box as the FORCE-giving star. The game offered three levels of play and was billed as the most exciting computer game a player would ever find.

  The first video game cartridge bearing the Star Wars name appeared in 1978, on the RCA Studio II clone machines called the Sheen M1200 and the Mustang Telespiel Computer. Licensed releases for the Atari 2600 began in 1982 with The Empire Strikes Back, where players piloted a snowspeeder during the Battle of Hoth and destroyed AT-AT walkers. Jedi Arena followed in 1983 as the first game to attempt a lightsaber battle, taking clear inspiration from the scene where Luke Skywalker trains against a floating seeker droid.

  Atari's 1983 Star Wars arcade game pushed the technology further than anything that had come before it. It used color vector graphics and included the first ever digitized speech sampled from a film. The player sat in the cockpit of Luke's Red Five X-Wing, fought waves of TIE fighters alongside Darth Vader, wove through towers on the Death Star's surface, and made the final trench run. That single cabinet established the template for interactive Star Wars experiences that game designers would return to for decades.

• 3. Lucas Takes Control

  ›

  In the early 1980s, George Lucas decided to invest in the video game market directly. Through Lucasfilm, he built his own game development company and called it LucasArts. The timing created a problem: Lucas had already licensed the Star Wars rights to outside developers, so LucasArts spent its first years making original adventure games and World War II flight combat titles instead.

  When LucasArts finally regained the Star Wars rights in 1993, it put its flight simulator experience to immediate use. Star Wars: X-Wing became the first self-published Star Wars video game and the first space flight simulation in the franchise. It was one of the best-selling games of 1993 and launched a series that gathered numerous awards. Sequels followed: TIE Fighter in 1994, X-Wing vs. TIE Fighter in 1997, and X-Wing Alliance in 1999.

  Also in 1993, The Software Toolworks used what the source describes as the first multimedia explosion to release Rebel Assault, a game that relied heavily on full-motion video and photographs to tell its story. Two years later, in 1995, Dark Forces became the first Star Wars first-person shooter, built on a custom LucasArts engine called Jedi. It introduced the character Kyle Katarn, a former Imperial stormtrooper who joins the Rebellion and eventually becomes a Jedi. The source notes that Katarn's story arc closely mirrors that of Finn in the 2015 film The Force Awakens. That 1996 Nintendo 64 title Shadows of the Empire represented LucasArts trying to fill in narrative gaps between The Empire Strikes Back and Return of the Jedi, casting the player as mercenary Dash Rendar.

• 4. Knights and Galaxies

  ›

  BioWare's Knights of the Old Republic debuted in 2003 on the Microsoft Xbox and PC and was critically acclaimed immediately, winning Game of the Year at the Game Developers Choice Awards that same year. The game, known among fans as KotOR, told a story set thousands of years before the films in a corner of the Star Wars universe that no film had touched.

  Knights of the Old Republic II: The Sith Lords came from Obsidian Entertainment in 2004. Critics praised its cerebral writing and its willingness to sit with moral ambiguity, drawing comparisons to The Empire Strikes Back. Those same critics also noted that it was derivative of the first game and that it arrived in an incomplete state.

  The same year KotOR launched, the Star Wars Galaxies massively multiplayer game opened its servers. That world ran for years before Star Wars Galaxies servers shut down on the 15th of December 2011. Players who wanted to keep experiencing it could only do so through private emulator projects, and the game is considered canceled. BioWare launched a separate MMORPG, Star Wars: The Old Republic, which released globally on the 20th of December 2011, with pre-orders having opened in July 2011 and open beta weekends confirmed for September of that year.

• 5. Disney, EA, and the Canon Reset

  ›

  The Walt Disney Company's 2012 purchase of Lucasfilm ended LucasArts as a development studio. In April 2013, Disney and Lucasfilm announced a partnership with Electronic Arts that gave EA exclusive rights to produce Star Wars games for consoles and PC for a decade. The deal was expected to expire on the 14th of October 2024. Disney kept the mobile platform rights for itself.

  On the 24th of April 2014, most Star Wars video games produced since 1977 were reclassified as Star Wars Legends and declared non-canonical. The stories those games told, the characters they introduced, the expanded universe they built over decades, all of it was separated from the official continuity in a single administrative decision.

  EA's first Star Wars game under the Disney brand released on the 14th of October 2014. The EA DICE-developed Battlefront reboot arrived in 2015, timed to launch alongside The Force Awakens. Because of the shortened development window, the team cut the single-player campaign entirely and focused the game on online multiplayer. Finn actor John Boyega was among those who publicly criticized the decision. Star Wars Battlefront II, released in 2017, addressed that criticism directly. Its story mode was set between Return of the Jedi and The Force Awakens, with the player controlling an Imperial special forces commander named Iden Versio.

  Due to lower-than-expected sales and mixed reception toward EA's handling of the Battlefront series, EA's exclusive deal was halted in January 2021, more than three years before the contract was formally set to expire.

• 6. Fallen Order and New Partners

  ›

  Respawn Entertainment's Star Wars Jedi: Fallen Order released on the 15th of November 2019. Its story followed Cal Kestis, a survivor of Order 66, hiding from the Empire and its Inquisitors. The game took place in the period between Revenge of the Sith and A New Hope.

  The success of Fallen Order, combined with the difficult reception of Battlefront II, pushed EA CEO Andrew Wilson to announce publicly that the company was doubling down on Star Wars games. Respawn followed with Star Wars Jedi: Survivor, which released on the 28th of April 2023, set five years after Fallen Order and following Cal Kestis and his Mantis crew. In September 2023, actor Cameron Monaghan confirmed a third game in the series was in development.

  In January 2021, Lucasfilm revived the Lucasfilm Games label as the licensing brand for all Lucasfilm intellectual property. The announcement included a new Indiana Jones game from MachineGames and a new open world Star Wars game from Ubisoft and Massive Entertainment, the first major non-EA Star Wars title. Lucasfilm was careful to affirm that EA would continue making Star Wars games, but stated they felt there was room for others. That same year, a Knights of the Old Republic remake was announced as a timed PlayStation 5 exclusive, with Jennifer Hale confirmed to return as Bastila Shan. In December 2021, Quantic Dream announced Star Wars Eclipse, set in the High Republic Era. Star Wars Zero Company, a turn-based tactics game from Bit Reactor and Respawn set during the Clone Wars, was announced for a 2026 release.

• 7. What Never Got Made

  ›

  At E3 2012, EA and LucasArts announced Star Wars 1313, an action-adventure game centered on a bounty hunter descending to level 1313 on Coruscant to unravel a criminal plot. The game deliberately moved away from the Force and lightsabers in favor of gunplay and bounty hunter mechanics. It was set to release in fall 2013. Disney's purchase of Lucasfilm ended it.

  A third Battlefront title had been planned by Pandemic Studios for 2006 but was also canceled. Prior to Visceral Games closing in 2017, the studio had been building an untitled game set between Return of the Jedi and The Force Awakens, with Amy Hennig, formerly of Naughty Dog where she oversaw the Uncharted series, serving as creative lead. On the 17th of October 2017, EA announced Visceral's closure and said the project, codenamed Ragtag, would be revamped into a broader experience with more player agency. On the 15th of January 2019, reporting confirmed the project had been canceled. Rogue One writer Gary Whitta publicly criticized EA for the cancellation and expressed hope that Disney would open the Star Wars license to other companies.

  On the fan side, Frontwire Studios began work in January 2016 on Galaxy in Turmoil, an unofficial Battlefront installment built in Unreal Engine 4. On the 4th of June 2016, the game secured a distribution deal through Valve for a free Steam release. Lucasfilm sent a halt request on the 22nd of June 2016. By the 31st of July 2016, Frontwire announced the cancellation, citing the possibility that the fan game might draw attention away from EA's Battlefront series. Frontwire eventually redirected the project into a cyberpunk-themed original IP, keeping the Battlefront III-inspired space-to-ground battle mechanics but removing all Star Wars references.